TOWARDS A MIDDLE EASTERN SETTLEMENT? THE POLICY OF AMBIGUITY.

This article focuses on the ambiguity in middle eastern settlements. Ambiguity has bedeviled the Palestine issue since the Balfour declaration, indeed ambiguity and double-talk. Two vital formulations were particularly redolent of double-talk. The first was the use of the concept national home. The second lay in the safeguarding clause that nothing in the declaration should be taken as prejudicing the rights of the native inhabitants of Palestine. The double-talk is most employed in three areas. The first has to do with the twin suggestion that Israel should be given defensible frontiers and that she should withdraw from occupied Arab territories to the frontiers of 1967. The second is to be found in the use of phrases such as the legitimate rights of the Palestinian peoples.